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Comment by ronaldx | Hacker News Reader

My housemate works as a marriage registrar.

I just asked him what percentage of marriages in our local area are primarily for visa exchange purposes. He said "a majority".

I think this article makes an assumption that it's normal/preferable to get married. It misses the fact that there are now very few reasons for a happy, two-earner household with children to actually get married. Marriage papers are in no way a required part of a stable and loving relationship.

People don't often get married today unless there's some real political benefit to them: inheritance is becoming less important and free movement of labour is now one of the major motivators.

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I'd like to see a citation for that rather than anecdotal evidence.

There were a bit over 2 million marriages in the US in 2012. There were some 27k K-1 visas issued in 2012 (there were more IR-1 and CR-1 visas, but those are generally issued to people who married abroad). I don't know the numbers on change of status applications, but I doubt they'd be an order of magnitude higher, especially given that if you're not on an immigrant visa already, you may be in for additional scrutiny.

I'm guessing this is one of those legendary examples where startups consisting of young urban professionals only know of, and only attempt to solve young urban professional problems. In SV, or maybe Manhattan, or Mt View, that anecdote is probably true, but in the rest of the country the situation is a rounding error.

I think you already recognise that this anecdote is difficult or impossible to measure, but let's try e.g. http://www.immigrationboards.com/ireland/large-number-of-sha...

Here is a politician admitting that 3% of Irish marriages are 'sham': http://www.rte.ie/news/2013/0728/465110-sham-marriages/

Edited to clarify: Not a majority, but 'sham' is a far stronger condition than what I'm talking about. This represents evidence that people are motivated to get married for residency: but the type of marriage I am talking about is not counted in these stats (those where marriage papers are motivated by a genuine goal to live in the same country as your partner).

3% is not even remotely "a majority".

> Here is a politician admitting that 3% of Irish marriages are 'sham': http://www.rte.ie/news/2013/0728/465110-sham-marriages/

He's not a politician, he's a civil servant, and he's not admitting it, he's claiming it.

And 3% is, erm, a very, very long way from a majority.

Until your significant other gets injured and you try to show up at the hospital to make the decisions any married couple is allowed to make. That is _one_ of the issues you will face as an unmarried "partnership."

This is also the reason why those uppity gays are not content with the crumbs of "social unions." Non-married couples do not have the same rights as married couples.

of course this is US-centric

If you think ahead, you can give someone those rights without marring them. The only real exclusive benefit is sharing healthcare and retirement benefits which is far less significant in a two income household.

In the USA, there are laws in the way. You can't sign a contract with a hospital giving you the right to visit your partner. Not in practice.

Off the top of my head, I could probably come up with a thousand potential problems with living together unmarried (in the US).

Here's a big one: if you work for any church-based organization (and they are huge employers, e.g. operating large schools, hospitals and universities), they might fire you because they suddenly decide you are violating some arcane religious doctrine.

Now you might say "I didn't want to work there anyway," but that's not how life works for most people who are not well-paid twenty-something software engineers.

> Until your significant other gets injured and you try to show up at the hospital to make the decisions any married couple is allowed to make.

Sure, it depends on the law in your local area. As non-married couples gain rights, it removes reasons for people to get married.

Whatever additional rights you get for being married are your primary motivator: that's what I was trying to say. Here, it seems primarily to be EU work visas.

Why can't non-married couples give each other power-of-attorney for those things? I ask this not rhetorically.

I'm not from the us, but i do have these powers form my sister and my parents (and they do for me). We can for each other decide what medical procedures should and shouldn't be done. In a extreme case that hopefully does not happen soon we may even decide life sustaining measures to be stopped. Where I'm from one can simply give such powers to another person.

The trick is getting hospitals to not ignore PoA: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/12/roger-gorley-arrest...

I imagine that it depends on the state (or country, if we're not being US-centric), but many non-married couples can and do set up durable powers of attorney (PoA), advance medical directives, wills, and so on.

As a sibling commenter noted, the trick is then getting the hospital, partner's family, etc. to recognize the PoA document; while the law surrounding powers of attorney is generally quite clear, there are certainly plenty of horror stories of hospitals, families, etc. ignoring such documents. I imagine that the likelihood of this happening varies from state to state, hospital to hospital, possibly even doctor to doctor, and so on.

That said, in the US, basically all of the time, you'll be _far_ better off for having drawn up a durable power of attorney than you would be if you hadn't. Definitely money well-spent if you're in an unmarried partnership. I suggest finding a lawyer who specializes in LGBTQ family law; they generally will be happy to take any couple on as clients, regardless of whether they are same/opposite sex, cis/trans, etc., and they have literally "seen it all," which means that they know about all kinds of legal edge cases that can cause trouble for people in a non-married partnership.

As an aside, I'm continually amazed by how many _married_ couples don't have wills, PoA documents, advance directives, etc. etc. filled out. Even if it's not strictly necessary from a legal perspective, having one's wishes and instructions written down explicitly is a relatively small-seeming thing that can make a very bad situation noticeably less awful (or so I've heard from people who've been there).

They can. It's expensive and often doesn't work when you need it most. Lots and lots of long-term gay couples can attest to the expense, complication and ineffectiveness of trying to replicate marriage through contract law and other civil deeds.

Add to this that marriage is recognized internationally. Alternative contracts will have to be translated and made legit for any other country a couple goes to.

The amount if paperwork required to get married is quite small, compared to something like buying a car. The overall cost of getting married is small. The signal if one person in the relationship refuses to get married is probably strong. If both people refuse to get married it is a non issue, but I suspect that is still not the norm.

The cost of getting married isn't small when you include the probability and cost of divorce. (Or the consequences of not getting a divorce when everyone is miserable and fighting)

Those costs are associated with a civil union. In most western countries, and in many states, having had kids together and/or a joint bank account is enough to have the same divorce consequences in separation.

More info in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common-law_marriage

Only 9 states still have common-law marriage, most that have historically recognized it have since thankfully abolished it.

Of course if you have kids, you still have to worry about child support, which can be very problematic in several states, but that is a whole other can of worms.

It all depends on the circumstances.

In the country I now reside in, there is little difference between common law marriage, "official" marriage, and civil union - if you have no kids, and divorce/separate within 7-8 years, then each partner gets what they brought in (and any substantially "joint" income during the same time, e.g. appreciation of an apartment, unless otherwise agreed upon in advance, is split 50/50) . If you are married and/or crossed to the 15-20 year area unmarried, then any income generated during the "united" period (including retirement accounts, pension funds, etc) is assumed 50/50, but anything before (and inheritances) go back to whoever brought them in.

Prenups, of course, take precedence although some have been nullified by courts as being unreasonable (mostly in cases where the prenups says in the event of a divorce wife gets little/nothing, but then separation comes e.g. after 20 years of marriage/union and giving up a career to raise 4 kids with husband's approval and support).

"It misses the fact that there are now very few reasons..."

I'm going to take the wild guess you're male. As an old married guy with a daughter I can assure you there is enormous investment in advertising money to specifically get females interested in spending around the cost of a cheap new car to get married.

I'm not even claiming this is a large part of the reason for marriage propaganda, however, thousands of advertising dollars are spent to convince females that spending tens of thousands on a wedding would be a great idea. Probably fairly heteronormative and once civilization arrives and gay marriage is more widely "permitted" then we'll start to see a lot more advertising dollars spent convincing guys that spending $10K on a wedding is fabulous.

And if you think marriage is expensive, try divorce.

My wife and I paid about $10K for our wedding, and felt we cheap skated out on a few things. This kind of social pressure is fine when its only about one months income, but for poor people, its kind of a dumb social policy. Giving the same $10K to the educational-industrial complex or real estate/banking industries isn't going to improve their lot in life either, so its puzzling.

One interesting thing to think about is our marriage was basically a little ceremony followed by two co-located family reunions, and it cost about $10K. In comparison a couple years ago my wife hosted and organized a family reunion at a city park for her family, about as many people attended, and our out of pocket was $82 for a park pavilion rental. So we're looking at almost two orders of magnitude of cost inefficiency.

There is a large market full of money to solve the difficult problem of providing a storybook princess wedding to women for something between $10K and $100. This is not exactly a stereotypical YC startup idea, but SOMEONE is eventually going to do it and rake in the cash.

Having been a starving student and starting out on a low salary in a medium cost of living area, I assure you there are very few investments available. If I have $10M there are plenty of interesting ways to invest it to improve my life, but if I have $100 laying around there's almost nothing to do with it that is not brainless consumerism or basically throwing it away. You can't bootstrap yourself if you can't invest in any way. Maybe microlending will help, although seems like lots of scams in the field. You'd think advanced computerization and networking would force microinvestment and microtransactions into the financial markets, but you'd be totally wrong. Check the price of NYSE:BRK.A and get back to me. We keep people poor by preventing them from having a profitable use for small amounts of excess money. There's probably a startup idea in there somewhere... a bitcoin powered stock exchange where you can trade any rational fraction of a stock or something like that.

There is evidence that big weddings correlate to a lower divorce rate so it might not be pure waste. If nothing else a big wedding creates a clear separation of married vs unmarried life. Much like a difficult cumming of age ceremony may influence long term behavior.

Then again it's hard to separate the mindsets of people that get married at a justice of the piece vs inviting 100+ people to the big event. I suspect cost is less of a factor than the amount of effort spent planning the event as thinking about a wedding probably promotes it's importance more than it's cost or the day it's self. aka deciding which table cloth to use is not important, but thinking the wedding is important enough that the table cloth choice is an important decision is probably meaningful.

Does this evidence really show that expensive weddings decrease divorces, or could it be that expensive weddings signal marriages that are less likely to end in divorce?

Consider:

Parent of the Bride or Groom: "I really like [whoever] and think they are great for you; let me pay for your fancy wedding."

Parent of the Bride or Groom: "I really think that [whoever] is sketchy and is wrong for you; this marriage will not last, pay for it yourself."

Or potentially even:

"We are two young successful people in love, lets get married."

"We are two young impoverished people in love. Let's get married, but since money is a source of constant stress and anxiety for us, let's keep it cheap."

Either way you slice it, divorce rates are high so if a divorce is an idea that concerns you, you should probably not get married.

Note I said big not expensive weddings as large weddings need not be expensive. It could simply be that having a large extended family and or lot's of friends close by is the important factor.

As to not getting married, married men live significantly longer. Again that may speak more to the type of people who get married than the actual value of marriage. However, anecdotally having someone else push you to go to the doctor and follow there advice probably has significant value. Still there is a lot of evidence that not getting divorced has significant value now many people think that relates to who your spouse is but the number of strong / successful arranged marriages suggests having the right mindset is vary important.

Either big or expensive, I don't think the direction of causation there is clear without more information. The number of attending family members could easily signal the number of family members who support the wedding or think that the marriage will last.

(The size of a wedding is also closely related to expense. Large venues are more expensive, and catering/booze is more expensive when you have more people.)

"There is evidence that big weddings decrease the changes of divorce"

Nope, in our case, being a bit older, stable higher income careers, somewhat older lifestyle meant two unrelated things 1) we could spend money that lovesick teenagers could never hope to afford 2) Being older / stable / whatever you want to call it, means the marriage can't suffer growing pains when we become older / stable / whatever so divorce is much less likely. I think it a fair assumption that people change a lot more from 18-28 than from 28-38 or 38-48. From looking at my parents I don't think they changed a lot from 38-68, although I don't wanna know whatever they did as hippies before they got to 38.

I think these two conditions internally correlate much better than they correlate with each other, although anecdotally I suppose it randomly happens to be more than a minor coincidence.

To be fair, the MVP for a wedding is already less than $1000. People can choose to pay more to get stuff they prefer (it's their money after all) but they aren't forced to.

To use an analogy, just because the rich like to take long holidays in distant countries doesn't mean the poor can't take short holidays less far away.

Keeping the analogy on track WRT the linked article, it would be more like claiming rich people take long holidays far away and tend to be more literate than poor people, therefore if poor people take short holidays closer to home, they will be more literate.

"...if I have $100 laying around there's almost nothing to do with it that is not brainless consumerism or basically throwing it away."

People could put that money in an emergency fund or pay off credit card debt. 39% of Americans carry credit card debt month to month [1], and I'd believe a far higher proportion of the poor would.

[1] http://www.nfcc.org/newsroom/FinancialLiteracy/files2012/FLS...

I would like to modify your industrial complexes descriptions a bit: it is more like the education-employer-banking and real-estate-municipality-banking industrial complexes. The more financially successful I get, the more perspective I get and see these complexes feed off of what can be many times ruinously-expensive pursuits by middle class families to hew to normative expectations if they live anywhere near the top-10 metro areas in the US, maybe even the top-20.

The "disruption" we're talking about at HN has currently mostly served capital interests and concentration of power/wealth. Even the example you cite of fractional stock ownership plays into that concentrating trend (most poor to middle class families simply do not have the financial stability and acumen to weather what are to them volatile equities or even indexes, which plays into the pockets of better-capitalized participants). I suspect we'll see some unexpected socioeconomic reactions from families in response to these pressures, and disruptions if any will organically arise from these demographics' reactions. One possible unintended consequence for example, might be the rise of line/group marriage, poly and extended families simply from the economic pressure of shouldering the massive debt burdens being placed upon families, with simultaneous wage depression and and inflationary pressures on goods and services this demographic primarily uses (current inflation measures only serve the interests of the capital class; good for me, but steadily disastrous over the long haul for poor and middle class families).

The heteronormative nuclear family with the original two biological parents is already a minority within the US, less than 25% as of 2000. But consider the vast waste that the household formation of a nuclear family entails: expensive capital is tied up into "white goods" that are used a fraction of the time throughout the week, just for starters. When due to combined wage and debt pressure people start organically forming non-traditional households (the nucleus of which has already started: the vast majority of households are non-traditional though as yet very small-scale) out of necessity and self-preservation, major industries would be impacted (both positively and negatively).

Now imagine just the political repercussions if this came to pass: if the "Moral Majority" is blowing a gasket over gay marriage now, what invective would we see when gays are included into group marriages and helping raise children in that context? Into this cauldron of change is where we will find the next disruptive moves.

I don't know what form the change is going to come from (I have some guesses), but I suspect something interesting will arise from the pressures our civilization is exerting upon these demographics.

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